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Nidi62 writes "We all know that Michael Bay loves to put 86 minutes of explosions into a 90-minute movie. But it appears that he has found a new way to screw up a movie. He is directing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot in which the turtles are not created with ooze: they are 'from an alien race, and they are going to be tough, edgy, funny and completely loveable.' No word yet on whether he's consulting with George Lucas on how to totally destroy the origin and essence of a classic story."
Responding to criticism, Bay thoughtfully explained that fans need to "chill."

But who thinks this is a GOOD idea? anyone? Bueller? I am starting to think that some of these "geniuses" are nothing but VERY lucky hacks. take George Lucas, did you know he wanted to make Indy 3 in a haunted house? or make C3P0 a slimy used car salesman in the original Star Wars? Or that Luke's original name was something like "Rex Starkiller"? I have a feeling these guys are just hacks that luck out in they get people to work with them that take the one or two good germs of ideas they have and get rid of all the schlock and shape it into something good. Problem is when Lucas became rich and famous he got rid of those that said 'That's a fucking stupid idea George" and replaced them with yes men and then you get The Phantom Menace.

While I'm sure most here have seen them for the few that haven't watch the the Plinkett reviews [redlettermedia.com] and pay close attention to the looks on the faces of those around him during the behind the scenes. George will come up with some lame idea and they just smile or let out a really half ass fake laugh and you can see if you look at their eyes they are thinking "WTF? why isn't anyone saying anything? this is a joke, right? Are we being punked?" but nobody has the balls to say anything. I bet Bay is the same way, I bet he could announce that 'Here is the setup, the TMNT are created when Donald Trump gets exposed to radioactive lettuce which gives him a MASSIVE case of the runs and the shit travels through the pipes (which we'll follow with 3D camera work) where it lands in a sewer pipe on some pet store turtles that were flushed down a different crapper, its brilliant!" and everyone gets a queasy look and goes "Wow, that is a great idea Michael, you're the best!"

"No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." H.L. Mecken

"No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the record for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people." H.L. Mecken

There have been other stories on Slashdot where this quote would be pithy and appropriate, but here - man, we're talking about people getting their panties in a bunch over CARTOON TURTLES!

I'M SORRY ESCORT WAGON, but really this is slashdot. If you aren't interested in being upset by things that like this then you have no place here. I bet you don't even live your parents basement do you?
The Irony being that Slashdoitters (spelled like that on purpose) are usually complaining that they should be able to do what they want with IP. I guess unless its Turtles or Star Wars.

It is idiocy as only someone like Michael Bay can imagine. Take a brand that has endured as long as it has, even if it's never had huge commercial success with the prime time market, and fuck it in the posterior so no new fans like it, and all the old fans want to nerd-rage murder him. This is brilliant.

I'm so angry right now, I'm molting. I would wish an aneurysm on him, but frankly, he's clearly already brain dead.

weren't you here for the Startrek reboot? That what reboot means, take something that people like and totally screw it up for your own ego trip. That way you can make a totally mediocre movie and still expect good box office take from the fanboys that go just because of the name.

The problem is that the Star Trek reboot was still taking place in space, with space ships, on a trek, if you will...

If you take Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and make them aliens instead, you kind of just ditched half the title right there; they're no longer mutants, or turtles. For that matter, they may not qualify as teenagers, and can an alien really be a ninja?

If you take TMNT and change enough so that none of those letters can apply anymore, is it still TMNT?

Good question. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. You're basically asking does 'any sufficiently alien being is indistinguishable from a teenage mutant ninja turtle' hold? Is TMNT only in the eye of the beholder?

Technically, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were never actually Ninjas. As we should all know from biology class, turtles are not mammals. And one of the few established facts about ninjas is that they are mammals.

Some reboots haven't been that bad (Battlestar Galactica, Ocean's Eleven). A couple have improved on the original (Battlestar Galactica). Some have been downright awful (Land of the Lost, 21 Jump Street). And some the jury is still out on (Star Trek).

I'm pretty sure the jury on Star Trek is already out, and that it was good, just different. The movie changes the series from an adventure drama to more of an action movie. Although the reboot feels like a dumbed down version of Star Trek, they tried to stay true to the original cannon.

While I'm sure any Trek fan will point out all the things they changed, they did change things up a bit, they did a lot of things right (ladder in the hallway, redshirt on an away team mission, rigging the Kobayashi Maru Test, Sulu is a fencer) to make sure everybody knew that the movie was really Star Trek. Besides, the original Star Trek already established split timelines as cannon, so any changes you make can be considered cannon in an alternate universe.

The movie was good, tried to stay true to the original, what's not to like?

TOS was an exceptionally good scifi series, when it comes to televised scifi. In 1966, when computers at home, mobile telephony, tablets, etc were unheard of, and when most of the world did not even have television, there comes a show that;

-shows people working on computer screens, by touching them.-have mobile communicators.-people work on a computer network-computer accepting voice commands

Let's also not forget warp drive, teleportation, antigravity, and the first ever interracial kiss on TV.

That was groundbreaking, wasn't it?

Fast forward 40 years later, and much of what ST showed has been implemented in one form or another. We have networked computers, mobile computers, communicators, tablets, and interacial relationships are aplenty every day on TV.

So, what this new movie offers us over the old one, from a scifi perspective? nothing at all.

Not only that, but as an action movie, it is rather lame. The plot holes are as big as Kirk's ego, and all the consistence the old universe had had gone out of the window.

To me, that means one thing only: it was a bad movie.

Did it make a huge profit? yes, it did. But that does not mean anything. The movie audience has been brainwashed with so many bad movies the last 20 years, that they do not know what a good movie is any more. They will watch any shit thrown at them, if they get their entertainment fix. The general audience watches Big Brother, America's Most Wanted and every MTV teenage trash series. For them, STXI may have been even intellectual, but that does not mean it was a good film.

A Russian officer, at the height of the cold war (okay, a lot of the writers used him as comic relief, but even so...)

An intelligent asian who was an expert in a European sword fighting style (asian actors at the time were mostly comic relief, eastern martial artists - as Sulu was in the 2009 film, or other stereotypes in US TV)

It wasn't just portraying technical developments in the future, it was portraying social changes. In the 2009 films, Sulu fought with a katana in a Japanese style, Kirk was a frat boy, Spock was a geek, and, aside from the space ships, it could easily have been set in the USA today.

It's the difference between a book with a good author, and a book with a good author and a good editor. There were some things that weren't bad, but could have been tightened up. A couple of examples:

Sulu's sword fighting style. In the original, he was a fencer. In the new one, he fights in a Japanese style because, you know, he's asian and that's how asians fight. It was just lazy stereotyping. Fixing it just required tweaking the fight choreography a bit.

The jury is still out on the Star Trek "reboot" movie? I watched it in the theatres when it came out. I should preface the next thing I say by pointing out that I have eclectic tastes and can enjoy just about anything. As a dumb action-comedy/self-parody movie, I found the movie enjoyable enough. As part of the actual Star Trek franchise though, the jury is in. It wasn't any good.

For starters, it's a time travel story. Time travel stories can be quite good sometimes, but 90% of Star Trek time travel stories aren't very good. You have to be very careful with time travel as a plot point. Beyond that:* Red matter? They drill to the core of a planet to turn it into a black hole with something called "red matter". The stuff works without needing to be at the core of a planet, which means you could destroy a planet just by dropping some on the surface, but the villains still need to drill a hole to the core.

* Crazy villains. It's common for villains to be crazy. But the villains in this story were cloudcuckooland nutso crazy. Their planet blows up, so they go after someone who was trying to stop it for revenge. They end up back in time and then wait around for decades for him to show up so they can commit genocide a few times while he watches. All this for love of their lost empire. For some reason, despite being from the future, with advanced technological knowledge and future technology in their possession, they don't hook up with their beloved empire and share the technology.

* Wacky supernova. Despite a supernova being a natural phenomenon we understand pretty well and not one of the wacky "anomalies" that crop up in the Star Trek universe, it apparently manages to hit the entire Romulan empire at once by surprise (they knew it was coming, but it supposedly arrived early), even though everyone and their mother has FTL communication and starships. For that to happen, the entire Romulan empire would need to be in one star system and the star of that system would have had to be the one that went supernova, which means that an entire technologically advanced civilization was living for centuries with sufficient technology to evacuate in a place they would have to know was doomed at any moment.

*Wacky supernova solution. Red matter makes black holes. Got it. How exactly does that stop a supernova, which is the big explosion when a Star collapses into a black hole?

*Wacky chases. Guy runs from space monster. Monster gets attacked by bigger monster which then chases guy. This isn't action movie stuff, this is wacky comedy stuff. This is the sort of thing that happens to Wile E. Coyote, not captains of the Enterprise. This is just stupid and it this sort of thing happens way too much in movies these days. Either directors or general audiences are clearly taking too much crack.

There are all kinds of other problems. Of course plenty of stuff like this is present in all kinds of other Star Trek material, but it's all present in the stuff that we put our faces in our hands and groan for, not the good stuff. Lots of directors (especially those like Bay), just really don't seem to get it. This seems to have always been the case. Just look at all the Batman movies made by the people who seemed to have their minds stuck on the old TV show.

The orignal 21 Jump Street was pretty damned good. It was heavy drama, and the actors looked like they could pass for high school seniors at the beginning of the show. Not so much at the end, of course. The two idiots they have in the current comedy version of Jump Street look like they're mid 30's. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight, put them in edgy clothes, they'll fit right in on any high school campus. They look older than the teachers FFS.

I watched the original Battlestar back in the day, as well as the abortion commonly known as Battlestar 1980. Trust me, the reboot is WAY better. Bay is drinking way too much of his own koolaide these days. Give 'em plenty of explosions to keep the 8-12 year olds happy, and who gives a fuck about a plot?

You wanna see some goddamned good Hollywood movies? Watch Casablanca. Silent Running. 2001: A Space Odessey. 2010. Outland. North By Northwest. These movies didn't need 87 minutes of every 90 in a car chase or an explosion, they had a story, plot, and actually didn't insult the intelligence of the people who watched them.

We are very near the point where the free stuff out there is good enough to replace the stuff in theaters and on television (and I'm not talking about The Pirate Bay kinda free). Freeware games. *Excellent* YouTube series. Really original daring stuff.

I'm currently wading through Gutenberg's science fiction bookshelf. I'm also slowly building up a list of good authors who are independent of publishers. It's very difficult as there is zero rating system and you have to spend time to read what ever book they offer for review. Since by reading it I'm making a commitment to them that first one should be free, proofread and edited by a professional and be someone consistent and coherent. (ow ow ow).

Why go through all that effort and then not mention the two authors you like? The applicable content rating system is word of mouth, after all, and if you mention them you'll help raise the signal to noise level.

It's the Lost style of drama, also found in Heroes and a few other series: make it up as you go along. Contrast this with Babylon 5, where the executive producer knew the entire 5-years story arc in advance. There were some things that needed to be tweaked (actors left and were not-so-subtly replaced by very similar characters, they thought they would be cancelled after 4 years, so they threw a lot of the year-five arc into year four and then had quite a weak fifth year), but the episode writers were told

Thundercats was awful. I'll admit I watched the show as a child. I even enjoyed it. A while back I had the misfortune of seeing it again on cable. My advice to the world is never watch 1980s cartoons as an adult. (Especially anything that had action figures!) Your brain will thank you.

Definitely maybe on the teenage part - It is incredibly unlikely that an alien race would mature at the same rate we would - so doubtful that if the aliens are adolescents they would also be teenagers. So not teenage, not mutants, not trained in ancient japanese fighting styles so not ninjas, and not turtles. Just another incredibly naked attempt to leverage an unrelated movie off an existing brand name.

I'd usually suggest we wait for a script or at least actual plot details but this is Bay, the script will just be drawings of things blowing up and pages from a Victoria's Secret catalog.

Screw it, bring on the explosions!!!

Hang on, the explosions are the part you are interested in? I beg to disagree. Bring on the Victoria's S

If you want to make alien kung-fucking-fu turtles, fine. Just don't call it something it isn't, you filthy fucking hack. Thanks for raping my childhood. Between Bumblebee peeing on a man, to this, I'd really like a way to sanction Bay's no-talent ass. FFS!

I was about to be really upset, until I remembered that pretty much every other TMNT film or TV series has been pretty terrible too. Maybe the original comics were good, but TMNT is one of the few things I doubt even Michael Bay can make any worse. Plus, it's been 5 years since the last remake, so it definitely needs a new one.

Personally, I'm looking forward to Michael Bay's series of Jane Austen movies. Pride and Prejudice just isn't complete without the alien invasion subplot.

I've read it, but sadly the additions didn't live up to the quality of the rest. I laughed a lot while reading it, but mostly during the parts that were in the original. The dojo scene with Lady Catherine was entertaining, but most of the other new parts just left me wanting to skip on to the end of them. It seemed like a waste of a good concept. I keep meaning to pick up some of the others in the series and see if they were better executed.

If you didn't know that Michael Bay films are visceral extravaganzas that do not bother with substance, I just told you, so now you do. If you are worried about him ruining our beloved turtles, I doubt future generations will look to a 2012 blockbuster to understand a 1980s cartoon.

Complaining about bad art is like complaining that the ipad is not user serviceable.

After some quick wikipedia, I realize that the cartoon I grew up loving in the late 80s was actually ripped from a comic book series I have never read. So I guess I prove my OP wrong. Some 12 year old kid could go see this movie, and it would forever represent the ninja turtles in their mind. Oh god, where is the art police when you need them?

It was GURPS based, so somewhat interchangeable with other systems. Not exactly a hard core RPG since it was pretty easy to cheese out an overpowered character, but my group found it a refreshing change of pace to our long running D&D campaign.

You could slap together a hack and slash, come up with some crazy mutations and skills for your new characters and charge through in a night. Half the fun was rolling characters, s

So... Teenage Alien Ninja Turtles? Unless they are proud warriors who have grown to full maturity, and its not a joyride to earth... Then its Adult Alien Ninja Turtles! But wait! If they are not mutated from turtles, then they are not turtles. So maybe Adult Alien Ninja Humanoid-Herpetolicoid Beings! But if they learned their martial arts on another planet, then its only Ninja-esq... So the new theme is

They're the world's most fearsome fighting team (From Another World!)They're heroes in a half-shell and they're green (Hey - get a grip!)When the evil Shredder attacks
These Aliens for some reason focusing on one small local crime lord when they have interplanetary travel don't cut him no slack!

WTF is it with Hollywood becoming the most unoriginal and rising as the pinnacle of butchery lately with re-makes, re-takes and spin-offs of original shows or movies? Who gives a hell what Bay's writers are doing to add complexity to the TMNT; it'll be a complete massacre, and in the end, Vanilla Ice can hold his head a little higher since this TMNT production will take his place on the suck-it-all podium in TMNT II: Secret of the Ooze.

"Flying monkeys with bombs. Lots of bombs. Wicked witch with machine gun on broom! Megan as Dorothy! Toto upgraded to pit bull. Shia LeBoeuf will ace it as the Tin Man with laser-eyeballs and missile-firing butthatch! Cowardly Lion now a Mexican political-asylum refugee who knows how to fight! The Straw Man now the Token Black Gay Teenage Computer Wizard in a wheelchair. With glasses. And braces. Eats HotPockets and Pepsi and Pringles while racing against time.

Old plot bad, new plot good. Secret Oz government lab accidently released virus that mutates Munchkins into slobbering zombie vampires. Only Dorothy can save them because her blood has radical new antibodies. Witch nearly kills her, but sex with the Tin Man revives her. New totally unexpected ending not involving explosions!"

You know, I honestly don't give a crap about TMNT. Not at all. Never a fan. But this STILL MAKES ME SEETHE.

Why the fuck can't Hollywood EVER GET ANYTHING RIGHT, EVER?

It's like Bryan Singer admitting he never read comic books as a kid. [inspirationalstories.com] So what do they do? Give him the X Men franchise to direct. Great thinking, guys. That's exactly what you want. Directors who never read the source material. Pilots that never read a flight manual. Doctors that never read a book on physiology. Truck drivers that never read the drivers code, driving on the wrong side of the streets. Perfect.
And it's not uncommon. Same goes for Tim Burton, [imdb.com] which perfectly explains Edward Bathands.

But this time, I have to be impressed though. This time, the ignorance of Hollywood rings true a clear as a bell. You know right at the outset that this is going to absolutely suck. Some people like Mr. Singer and Mr. Burton admit to not knowing the source material. Mr. Bay has basically admitted that he hasn't even read the fucking title. Because it's Mutant turtles, not Alien turtles as others have correctly noted. A new low, even for Hollywood.

Why the fuck do they keep hiring these people? A total fucking stranger they pick randomly off the streets could do better. They certainly couldn't know less about the topic. You can only go up.

From Topless Robot [toplessrobot.com]: "Okay, I'm getting a little pedantic here, but the fact remains that by making the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles aliens, Bay is needlessly changing one of the core components of the series -- one of their three fundamental adjectives, one might say -- for no discernible reason or benefit whatsoever. You know, I used to think that Bay was just an immensely successful idiot, but honestly, now I think he's our nerd satan. Here we are, enjoying Game of Thrones and the Avengers movie and unparalleled nerd art and prestige, and Bay is the Anti-Nerd, the serpent in our paradise, the one who will stop at nothing until all nerd goodness is ruined with aliens and pissing and balls and humping dogs and steaming piles of shit. Seriously, Michael Bay is the Nerd Devil"

Maybe years ago, but now Megan Fox's ass has probably had 15 surgeries and looks like it's made of plastic, much like the rest of her. I'll pass. Why the hell do naturally beautiful women feel the urge to completely destroy that??

Maybe years ago, but now Megan Fox's ass has probably had 15 surgeries and looks like it's made of plastic, much like the rest of her. I'll pass. Why the hell do naturally beautiful women feel the urge to completely destroy that??

I'm not a psychologist, but I'm pretty sure it's because deep down most people have self-esteem issues and when they were in high school the only boys who approached them were the confident ones who 'negged' them and provided a level of mental abuse that they tolerated and even found attractive. And they never recovered from it.

The real reason is society at large. The problems facing actresses are no different than the average girl. The key differences are that, a) actresses are pushed even more aggressively into conforming to a certain aesthetic; and b) the have the income to be able to act on it.

The guys in high school were douchebags and as such their mentality easily dismissed. The problem is that they were equally affect by social norms and thus were simply repeating what society at large expects of these girls.

Hence the expectation that women should look like surgically augmented toothpicks. The real problems are always a lot more subtle than people believe.

The guy just keeps resuscitating properties that have been long dead and buried, licensed for somewhere near the price of a six pack of Coors, and turning them into brands worth hundreds of millions of dollars again.

Doesn't matter if there are no original ideas.The problem in this case Bay's "original idea" is changing the turtles to aliens. I'm not a fan but I don't see why it's necessary or beneficial to do so. Especially when the title itself has the word "Mutant" and "Turtles".

The whole point of milking a franchise is to actually milk it. How does changing the foundation of the brand name help milk it more?

That said if it actually does well then the fans and people are saying keep screwing me. I won't be surprised

The rights-holders sold him the rights and he is free to do with them as he pleases.

Yet we are for some reason not free to express our displeasure?

Amen. I wasn't- and amn't- a major TMHT (*) fan (**), so I'm not massively upset personally. However, variants of the following stupid argument pop up on Slashdot all the time, namely that "it's a free market / free world therefore they're within their rights to do what they want with their thing / run their company how they like and you're free to not buy it and therefore you're not entitled to complain about it."

All but the last bit in bold may be arguably legitimate- and standard- but for some reason people around here seem to think that because there's a free market and people have the right to make a free choice then they have no right to complain.

Wrong. If "Fanboy Electronic Fashions" makes something I dislike or conducts their business in a manner I disagree with, yes, I don't have to buy it or do business with them (just as they're not obligated to pander to me). This fact *does not* disqualify me from criticising them anyway- whether I choose to buy their stuff or not- nor does it entitle them to protection from criticism. If I don't like the "uPhone" then "you don't have to buy it" doesn't stop me from criticising it, or encouraging others not to buy it- in fact, to believe otherwise pretty much implies you dislike free criticism of products (plus people who *had* bought it could similarly be dismissed with "well, you bought it anyway").

(*) Teenage Mutant *Hero* Turtles, yes, I live in Britain and we got the BBC-approved title;-)

(**) Probably due to being just a bit too old for the cartoon when it first came out (early to mid teens), though I knew people in my class at school who liked it.

I'm 34 and TMNT was a Darkhorse Comic by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. It was black and white ink and the titles were fucked up psychopaths out for revenge (and pizza, granted). They cussed up and down, cut down anyone in their path and lay waste to entire rooms of people with blood spray like a Kill Bill movie.